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Profound

I think this was the last song written on Artyfacts. It wasn’t the last song recorded but definitely the last song written. I had this nerdy idea on a Tuesday night (I think). I was thinking about how when I write songs it’s like I’m always trying to go slow and dream up the most profound lyrics I can (which I don’t always succeed at). Anyway, on this Tuesday I was thinking about how a music album is like a photo album, like it’s a document of something. I was feeling scrambled creatively because my songs were going in all different directions and I was still stumped about trying to pull them together. Sooooo, I decided I’d start over completely (see, musicians start over about 30 times whenever they are making records, it’s part of the process). This time I had a special idea. I got my microcassette recorder and decided that I would spend one hour talking into it and then I would write songs all connected to whatever I said. I actually did this. I talked for an hour and then I spent the rest of the night typing it all out so I could read it. I was trying to focus on writing songs that were immediate and not “for all time” but for the exact few seconds while it’s playing. I wanted to write songs that documented an hour and leave it at that. I thought about calling it “One Hour Inside My Head” (or something like that)…. Soooo, after I typed it all out I got some scissors and cut up phrases and started trying to piece them together into songs. I think a few of the lyrics came out of the experiment and the rest were inspired by the ones I’d collected. The basic thought here is how song lyrics are like super exaggerated and highlighted things. If you put a phrase in a song it suddenly has about 100 times as much meaning. You’re suddenly listening to each phrase from so many different directions. The connotation isn’t always understood and even the way the music sounds can effect the meaning of what is said. So singing songs can make you feel like people are just waiting around for you to say something profound. And that’s a weird feeling when the stuff going on in your head is mostly bland and uninspiring. This song is playing around with the feeling a songwriter has that everything he or she says in a song MUST be profound.